The following excerpt hails from Jongo & Adriano, a fotonovela by Brazilian artist Yhuri Cruz featuring two Black lovers who escape enslavement, one African-born and the other a Brazilian criollo. “Whatever resemblance these characters bare to historical fact might not be a coincidence,” Cruz tells us. He is in dialogue with writers like Saidiya Hartman whose poetic interventions in the archives of enslavement “refashion disfigured lives”; and he is also distinctly carioca, raised by a family who founded one of Rio’s oldest samba blocos. Jongo e Adriano is born of Cruz’s “Blackphagical” research with a group of actors called “Pretofágicos.” His artistic movement, Pretofagia, or “Blackphagy,” critiques the caricaturing of Indigenous and Black Brazil by white Brazilian modernists in the Antropofagia movement like Tarsila do Amaral and, later, tropicalistas like Hélio Oiticica, who recirculated the modernists’ program of cultural cannibalism. Simultaneously, Pretofagia re-
Jongo e Adriano - Pg 5 Capítulo 2 PORTO
About the Translator
Montana Ray holds an MFA in poetry and translation and a PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University. Ray translates from Spanish and Portuguese, especially feminist, fat, queer, Black, and Southern texts. She also explores connections between the US South and Latin America through her scholarship, public nonfiction, visual poetry, and photography. Before joining NYU’s faculty as Clinical Assistant Professor, she taught writing at Columbia University.
Contact: montana.ray@nyu.edu
About the Author
